Subject Area Accessibility Study in Computer Science, CIS and CAS

Background

During winter term, 2014, the following instructors from different computer technical fields collaborated with Disability Services and Distance Education to study the accessibility of their subject area:

Marc Goodman, Computer Information Systems

Gayathri Iyer, Computer Science

Susan Watson, Computer Application Systems

Funding for instructor time was generously provided by Deans of Instruction.

Programming Lab Accessibility Rubric for Visually Impaired Students

The following rubric has been developed to assess whether a programming lab is accessible to blind students. The rubric lists a set of standards that can play a role in making programming labs accessible. Each standard has been assigned one of three levels of importance: Essential, Important, and Helpful. The importance level relates to accessibility in the following ways:

Essential: Each essential standard must be met for a blind student to complete the programming lab substantially on their own. If an essential standard is not met, then an Assistive Aid or the course instructor will be required through the entire process of completing the lab, or the student will need to be provided with an equally effective, equally integrated alternative.

Important: If all essential standards are met, but one or more important standard is unmet, then the student will be able to complete most of the lab on their own, but will require help from an Assistive Aid or the course instructor to overcome some accessibility obstacles.

Helpful: The student will be able to complete the lab substantially on their own if all essential and important standards are met, but will be able to work more effectively if helpful standards are also met.

If information is provided in the form of a system diagram, UML Class diagram, Use-case diagram, or other visual format, then descriptive text or tactile graphics5 are provided as an alternative to this information.

Information required to complete the lab is provided in graphical format without alternative text or descriptions.

If a series of actions must be performed by the student, these instructions should be provided as a numbered list. It is also helpful to provide the keyboard shortcuts in these instructions7.

Instructions are provided in paragraph format or other unstructured block of text.

Notes:

Textual languages that rely on indentation level for meaning, such as Python, can be used by visually impaired students with refreshable Braille displays, or using a screen reader to read character-by-character. However, this does provide an additional obstacle to accessibility.

Some examples of primarily graphical programming languages in use at PCC include Scratch, LabVIEW and GameMaker. These languages will be extremely difficult to use for visually impaired students.

Document formatting is listed as "Important" in the rubric rather than as "Essential," because if everything in the lab is accessible except the document formatting, the student will likely be able to complete most of the lab on their own, with some help from an Assistive Aid. However, the Quality Matters Rubric that PCC uses to evaluate online course shells includes additional requirements in Standard 8 that must be met for a course to be considered "ready to teach online."

Please see the section on Tactile Graphics for more information on this technology and its limitations.

Examples of primarily graphical or animated output include the output from a Scratch or CeeBot program, or an interactive game written in GameMaker.

An example of providing keyboard shortcuts in the instructions would be to specify "Type Alt+F followed by S in order to save the document," instead of "Select Save from the File menu."